I have to admit that one Windows app I don't think I could live without is Photoshop.. currently using 7 (actually it's more the plugins that I can't live without). I use it at home and at work. Sometimes I bring small (and large.. file size that is) projects home because I can do them here in a fraction of the time because I have a better computer and a bunch of plugins to drastically reduce my time working with the files.

With that being said, I would really like to give GIMP a chance at handling a project or two and see how well it does. So, I was wondering what plugins for GIMP you think are among the MUST HAVE plugins.


For example, some of the projects I get have been scanned by a co-worker and the scan is lacking. In Photoshop I run it through a plug in or two and I've got something workable that didn't take me 30 minutes of manual adjustments.

That is just one of many. I have look at the gimp site and glanced at their plug ins but I want some real world advice.

It comes standard with a huge number of tools. For the above, right click on the picture, filters and enhance. However, notice the HUGE number of other special affects. I download and play with the animation plugins. Very cool. After you have an animation just so, and I wish web pages would do this, I right click, filters, animatiion, optimize. I have optimized web page gifs from web pages all over the place and mailed them back. Sometimes get a snarky response, sometimes thanks and almost always, what's GIMP.

http://www.gimp.org/
for howto, documentation, and a plugin registry. You can also find others by google
'gimp plugins'

RO

Oops, it is a little more manual, at times, thatn PS, but I find that very good. For example, I click instant fix, and it isnt' fixed. Undo, then start trying to dig and how to use, say 50% of the fix, if you catch my drift. I have very little experience with PS. I was on my Boss' computer before I got fed up with that particular OS (about 7 minutes) and told him to mail them to me so I can do them on my machine.

RO

Ok, I'm really hoping I just didn't see it, but is CMYK available in GIMP? I saw RGB and greyscale. Every so often our printers at work don't accept a color quite right (monitors are RGB and printers are CMYK) so what you see on the screen isn't always what you get on print. When this happens I have to put in the CMYK colors manually to ensure I get the exact color I needed.

Oh, and from what I saw..quick scroll through the filters.. both GIMP and Photoshop have about the same ones. Few differences but mostly the same.

The tools and the way GIMP works is going to take a bit of getting used to and slow me down a lot. I think I like the full window of Photoshop better than the small tool windows of GIMP but that's just a minor thing, I just need to adjust.

It will take getting used to. On thing, when you right click and get a menu, if you see the dashed line accross the top of the menu, click on that and the pulldown seperates and becomes a permanent menu. I don't know about CMYK like you asked though, dont' know what that is. I do know, that on print, you can adjust colors. Under image-->colors, there is RGB, greyscale and indexed. Is indexed what you want?

RO

P.S. Go under Xtns, scriptfu, loggos, cool metal. Set the font to zaphchancery...see what you think. :-)

here - take a look through these. should keep you busy for a while.

http://registry.gimp.org/index.jsp